'Marine Mom' fights from the other side

Louise KiernanTribune staff reporter

The real war is 6,000 miles away, in Umm Qasr or Nasiriyah or some nameless patch of Iraqi sand where she can only guess her son may be, but the war Fran Johns is fighting breaks out next to the Drake Hotel.

At the corner of East Lake Shore Drive and North Michigan Avenue, three men watch the thousands of protesters who, on the first full day of the war against Iraq, have steamrolled their way along the lakefront, leaving stranded bus drivers waving peace banners and the windows of high-rises silhouetted with onlookers.

Fran Johns walks toward the men, on her way home but still carrying her protest sign, "Marine Mom Against the War."

One of them -- older, dressed in a leather jacket and khaki pants -- looks at her and says, "You should be ashamed."

It has come, the moment that Fran has been expecting since she began protesting U.S. military action in Iraq five months ago. The moment when she confronts someone who challenges the belief that has sustained and driven her ever since, the belief that she clings to even more now that the fighting has begun: that she can support her son, who is a Marine, and oppose the war he has been sent to fight.

"Why should I be ashamed?" she asks.

Within moments, she and the three men stand, their faces inches apart, shouting at one another about Adolf Hitler and the lust for oil and North Korea until the men, it seems, bow to the fury of this woman whose short, black curls shake with her vehemence.

"I hope your son makes it," one of them offers. Fran walks away, already dialing her daughter on her cell phone.

"Thank you," she answers, still frustrated that she hasn't changed their minds.

This is her war. The war of words she fights because she can't do anything about the other war, the one her son, Rob Sarra, is fighting as a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Before the war began, in the first in a series of Tribune articles about Fran, an advertising executive, and her son Rob, she protested because she hoped war could be prevented. Now, six days into the conflict, as U.S. troops draw closer to Baghdad and every hour's news brings reports of more soldiers dead and injured, she wonders what good demonstrations can do.

"I don't know what to ask for anymore," she says. "Because I don't want the war."

Rob's war follows her wherever she goes. Into the elevator at her office building, where screens flash the latest headlines. Into the bathroom, where a co-worker greets her with a hug. She falls asleep to CNN, only to jerk awake because someone said, "Marine."

Her war is her defense against helplessness.

"Sometimes, creating the illusion you're doing something, even if it is an illusion, is better than not doing anything," she says.

She doesn't know where her son is. For days, she thought he was wherever Marines were getting hurt or killed. Now, based on dispatches from reporters embedded with his unit, the 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, she thinks she may have traced his route; on Tuesday, he may have been in Nasiriyah, site of some of the fiercest fighting so far.

Last weekend, Fran heard from Rob for the first time in a month, since he left the USS Dubuque, the ship that ferried his regiment from Camp Pendleton, Calif., to the Persian Gulf.

Three letters arrived in two days. They were all written while Rob was waiting in the Kuwaiti desert.

He fashioned a postcard from a cardboard sleeve of an MRE, a meal-ready-to-eat. "Hi From the Mid East!" he printed on an empty container of chicken tetrazzini. "This is the closest to Italian I will get for a while!"

On the other side, he wrote her that he had just done his laundry with a trash bag, a cardboard box and a bar of soap.

"We've been training a lot and are in `Pentwater' right now," he wrote, using the code word they had established for safety.

One night, Rob recounted, he bumped into television anchor Peter Jennings on his way out of church services, "We MUST be going to war if Jennings is here!" he wrote.

"Mom, I know you are worried," he continued, "but I think we are going to be OK. It seems right now the Iraqis are not going to put up much of a fight."

The world of these letters, where Rob could joke about going two weeks without a shower, where he had time to note the daily temperature ("45-50 at night") and describe the aircraft overhead ("4 Cobra attack helicopters") seems so distant from the images she sees now on her television screen.

On Monday night, she sat in front of the television, still wearing her black sweater, skirt and hose from work, her legs tucked beneath her on the couch, watching CNN.

"Part of me wants to step up protesting but not just protest," she said. "The problem with protesting is that it doesn't offer any other option."

She wishes she could talk to Rob about it. He has always said he supported her efforts against the war, but that was before war began.

She turned to scan the television screen, looking for her son in every image of a soldier.

"You look for your kid's face, you think maybe he's there," she said. "Then you realize they all look alike."

She goes to the demonstrations, she says, because if she didn't, she would just watch television and worry.

At the first demonstration after the war begins, in a crowd that includes half a dozen people wearing skeleton makeup and a man with a toilet seat liner around his neck, Fran and her partner, Angelo Kokkino, stand out. They look as though they somehow took a wrong turn on their way to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Angelo, who is an architect, wears a suit and trench coat, prompting one young protester to tap him on the shoulder.

"It's incredible," one says to his companions. "This very conservative couple."

The next night, Fran is back at Kluczynski Federal Plaza and unintentionally ends up in the front row of the march, her arms linked around a dozen or so anti-war activists she has come to know by their first names.

As they set off, she jokes, "I suppose if my son is on the front lines, I should be too."

But an hour later, Fran decides to leave. The tone is too militant and hostile, she thinks. She doesn't like the shouts of "racist police" and the chant, "Whose streets? Our streets!"

"I just can't support all these agendas," she says. "There's a little bit too much of the anarchy stuff."

She and Angelo slip out between the police officers flanking the demonstrators on either side.

They stand on a street corner. Angelo talks on his cell phone with a nephew who called after seeing the protest on CNN.

Fran faces the marchers, holding her sign. As people walk by, they flash peace signs or give her a thumbs-up sign or cheer.

A police officer in riot gear waves at her and she blows him a kiss. He breaks away from the line and comes over.

"Is your son over there?" he asks her.

"Yes," she answers. "I think he's near Basra right now."

"I'm a former Marine," he says. "He's going to be fine."

As he jogs off to rejoin the phalanx of police, he turns back.

"God bless you," he says.

Tears fill her eyes but she doesn't wipe them away.

She keeps holding her sign, high in the air.

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Read Part One of the series "A Son Goes To War" at chicagotribune.com /marinemom